A few weeks before the 2010 midterm elections, when pollsters from both parties were uniformly predicting a Republican rout, an article appeared on the right-wing Web site RedState with the title “It’s Time to Make GOP Leadership Less Powerful.” Its author, Russell Vought, was a thirty-four-year-old budget wonk who had previously worked as a House aide for Mike Pence, then the Conference chair. “I learned a lot from being on the inside,” he told me recently. In his view, the top Republicans in the House, starting with the Speaker, were primarily interested in preserving their own power, and they “distracted” conservative members from pursuing more explosive ideological fights. Vought left the House disenchanted, in the summer of 2010, taking a job with Heritage Action, an advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation. “If you are a conservative,” he wrote in his RedState article, “you want checks in the system to ensure that conservative back benchers . . . have enough road blocks to put up when Leadership is going off the rails of principle.”
The following year, after Republicans picked up sixty-three House seats in the midterms, an insurgent wing of the G.O.P. refused to raise the debt ceiling, in order to pressure the Obama Administration to cut the federal budget. To avoid a catastrophic default, the Speaker, John Boehner, made a deal with the White House, and cobbled together a majority by trading conservative Republican votes for moderate Democratic ones. To the conservatives, this was an unforgivable deceit. In 2015, they retaliated against Boehner, who eventually retired, and, in the process, created the House Freedom Caucus, a group of ideologues and extremists who made it their mission to antagonize Party leadership.
Last November, when Republicans took back the House but fell short of the landslide they were expected to win in the midterms, Vought saw a historic opportunity. “The House Freedom Caucus was made for this moment,” he tweeted, a day after the election. “They have the numbers to insist on a paradigm shifting, conservative speaker.” He added, “They must not fail.”
A lot had changed since Vought wrote his RedState warning in 2010. He is currently the president of the Center for Renewing America, a far-right group operating under the aegis of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a well-funded network that many in Washington regard as a kind of Trump Administration in exile; its main affiliate is America First Legal, an advocacy organization founded by Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s senior adviser. The former Trump Administration officials at the Center for Renewing America include Jeffrey Clark, who tried to overturn the 2020 election from inside the Justice Department; Ken Cuccinelli, an incendiary former Homeland Security official; and Kash Patel, a political appointee at the Department of Defense whose bio touts his pending lawsuits against the Times, CNN, and Politico “for defamation.”
In the Trump White House, Vought ran the Office of Management and Budget—first as deputy director, then as its head. During the past six months, he has advised House conservatives in the intensifying showdown over the debt ceiling. “Russ is the guy conservatives go to for intimate knowledge of how the federal budget works,” Newt Gingrich told the Washington Post. “He understands an enormous amount of federal budgeting, and that makes him a very big player.”
Vought, who is forty-seven, bald, bearded, and bespectacled, considers himself a “budgeteer” with a special bent. Working for Trump taught him the value of combining esoteric debates over budget policy with the pyrotechnics of the culture wars. He calls his primary enemy “the woke and weaponized regime.” He’ll tell you, for instance, that the Department of Education should really be called the Department of Critical Race Theory. “You’re going to get called names—bigot, racist, appeaser, nationalist,” he said. “You have to just plow through them and win the debate. You will win the debate on cultural issues.”
Each of the negotiators in the debt-ceiling standoff has a different narrative about when the drama began. Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker, claims he started pushing Joe Biden to discuss the issue in February. Biden, who at first refused to negotiate under the threat of a default, saw little reason to discuss anything until the House passed a bill outlining its budget priorities in late April. Vought’s time line goes back to the days right after the midterms, when McCarthy was campaigning to become Speaker. Initially, twenty members of the Freedom Caucus withheld support for McCarthy’s candidacy. From Vought’s perch at the Center for Renewing America, he encouraged them to hold out. At the time, he called McCarthy “a peace-time leader when we are in a cold civil war who will manage the GOP away from conflict instead of seizing it by the throat.”
McCarthy had every reason to be wary of the Freedom Caucus: when he ran to replace Boehner as Speaker, in 2015, its members blocked him. This time, after fifteen rounds of voting, McCarthy made significant concessions to get the Freedom Caucus behind him. One was to restore a tool called the motion to vacate the chair, which would allow a single member to call a vote on ending his Speakership. Another, more consequential move was to appoint Freedom Caucus members to key committees and leadership posts, essentially bringing them into the establishment after years in the cold. “They’ve been used to never having a seat at the table,” one Republican staffer told me. “They’d bitch and moan about it, and go on Fox. That’s changed since the Speaker’s vote.”
Vought, who refers to the Washington establishment as “the cartel,” identifies the Speaker’s battle as the defining moment of the current Congress. “I talk about it in terms of Old Testament versus New Testament,” he told me. “Everything is reinterpreted on the basis of the events that occurred.” McCarthy, he said, was a “cog,” an establishment functionary without a vision. His habit of giving members whatever they wanted—and his reputation as someone who privileged power over principle—appeared to strengthen the position of the ideologues. In January, McCarthy agreed to put two Freedom Caucus members and one of their allies on the Rules Committee, which controls how bills come to the floor for votes. For years, House conservatives had longed for influence on the committee; this outcome seemed to vindicate the strategy of the twenty holdouts who had initially blocked McCarthy. Vought called them “the lions that have been through battle and won.”
The resolution of the Speaker’s fight, Vought said, was a “power-sharing agreement.” “What I mean by that is not unlike what you would see in Israel’s Knesset or the Christian Democrats or Social Democrats in Germany,” Vought said. “You have a minority party that is needed for you to have majority votes. And, as a result, you don’t treat them as backbenchers.” As one Freedom Caucus staffer told me, “The entire point of the Speaker’s fight was that it wouldn’t matter who was behind the gavel. They need us to hold the Conference together. They can’t go around us. We can’t be cut out anymore.”
The Freedom Caucus is best known for what it’s against: the Republican establishment, business as usual in Washington, compromises of any kind. Boehner once said of its members, “They’re anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That’s where their mind-set is.” Until now, no member of the Freedom Caucus has ever supported raising the debt ceiling. They are fierce fiscal hawks who want to slash spending, particularly on social programs. Like many others in the Republican Conference, they regard the ballooning federal deficit as an existential threat; unlike the others, they say that they’re willing to let the U.S. default in order to break the cycle of government borrowing and spending.
This past March, however, caucus members staked out a new position. A cadre of hard-line conservatives in the House and Senate believed that they finally had the leverage to shape the Conference debate on a budget proposal. Vought helped them draft it. Eventually called the Limit, Save, Grow Act, it would cut some hundred and thirty billion dollars from the 2024 budget. The provisions were aggressive and wide-ranging, including putting a ten-year cap on federal spending; imposing work requirements on Medicaid eligibility; rolling back aspects of Biden’s signature piece of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act; and expanding fossil-fuel production. “I love to cut spending wherever it is, and I like to cut spending the most in the bureaucracy,” Vought said. In his telling, this is what separates him from past fiscal hawks, such as Paul Ryan, who proposed revamping Medicare and Social Security. Vought told me that he wasn’t necessarily opposed to that, but it didn’t get him “excited.” “I get excited about cutting the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education. That is where I think there is more damage being done to the American people, and you have an opportunity to fight on it every single year.”
In the spring, McCarthy desperately needed to pass a budget bill to show that the Republican Conference was unified; without it, he lacked the credibility to take the debt-ceiling fight to the White House. Members fell into roughly five camps, ranging from moderate to conservative, each with its own priorities. McCarthy picked the Freedom Caucus’s proposal as the Party’s baseline. “This bill did not come from the Budget Committee, and it did not come from the Speaker. It came from the Freedom Caucus,” Matthew Green, a professor at Catholic University and an expert on Congress, told me. “Think about it: they’re a faction. Only forty to forty-five folks, setting the agenda of the Party. That’s impressive.”
As McCarthy wrangled votes for the bill, a small but varied group of holdouts insisted on meeting with him. Many of their offices received phone calls from Vought: in January, he had been mobilizing the Freedom Caucus against McCarthy; in April, he was backing leadership. “What’s been missing on the right is that we have for far too long been shiny-objected, and let the cartel give us some version of our position,” he told me. Now McCarthy was pitching members on the Freedom Caucus’s own bill. “My view was that, if I was the Speaker of the House, this is the bill I would have written,” Vought said.
Republican moderates ultimately backed the budget bill, knowing that there was no chance it could survive the Democratic Senate. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, told E&E News, “If there was a 1 percent chance of any of these provisions ever becoming law, a lot of us would have treated that very differently.” When I spoke to Don Bacon, a representative from Nebraska, who has frequently criticized the Freedom Caucus for holding the rest of the Conference hostage, he was sanguine about the bill—not because he agreed with everything in it but because he thought it would force Biden to the negotiating table. The likeliest outcome of talks between Biden and McCarthy looked like a compromise that could earn a majority of Democrats and Republicans, if not a majority of Republicans.